Forum .LRN Q&A: I18N: Translating phrases rather than words

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1: I18N: Translating phrases rather than words
Posted by Peter Marklund on 12/12/02 12:07 PM

I just wanted to give translators an update on the work of changing messages in the catalog to be phrases rather than words.

Jarkko has been a great help in this work by finding places where multiple keys are used where one key should be used instead. Jarkko compiled a list of changes that were needed and I have committed all those changes to CVS but not updated the translation server yet. Please let me know if you find changes needed for translation to your language that are not covered by the list!

For example a phrases like "New Class" used to be #dotlrn.New# @class_instance_pretty_name@ and have now been changed to #dotlrn.new_class# where the en_US message is "New %class_instance_pretty_name%". This means that the en_US message can keep reusing the class pretty name but this reuse is optional (i.e. in finnish it is not possible).

I need to remove usage of gifs that are in the code after the dotlrn-1-0 branch now. After that I will look into how to manage upgrades of message catalogs. Lars already has very good ideas about how to do this. We will keep the package version number in the catalog file, and message keys will have an upgrade status that is either added or deleted. Messages can have a status of updated. We will probably save messages that have been updated locally in the database that are overwritten by the upgrade in an xml file.

We hope to be able to update the translation server next week.

Thanks for all the great translation work so far!

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2: Re: I18N: Translating phrases rather than words (response to 1)
Posted by Carl Robert Blesius on 12/12/02 05:20 PM
Nice work Jarkko! I am very partial to removing gifs where possible (if anything just for the improved accessibility). They could be replaced by red words in brackets... e.g. [<font="red">New</font>], [<font="red">Join</font>], [<font="red">Drop</font>] rather than the New, Join, and Drop gifs that dotLRN has inherited from SloanSpace.
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3: Re: I18N: Translating phrases rather than words (response to 1)
Posted by Jarkko Laine on 12/12/02 06:36 PM
Merci vielmal,

I guess you mean <span class="red">#dotlrn.New#</span> and so on 😊

But seriously, I'm exactly of the same opinion.

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4: Re: I18N: Translating phrases rather than words (response to 3)
Posted by Carl Robert Blesius on 12/12/02 07:13 PM
Yes that's the idea. 😊
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5: Re: I18N: Translating phrases rather than words (response to 1)
Posted by Peter Marklund on 12/13/02 05:13 PM
The approach I chose to go with for the gif links (join, drop, admin etc.) was to retain the gifs for the en_US version but let other locales simply use texts instead.

This way the en_US version can continue to enjoy the pretty gifs inherited from SloanSpace (they can be changed of course if the look-and-feel requirements are very different) while people can still have the labels of the links in their locale of preference.

Hope people find this compromise acceptable. Kudos to Jeff Davis for suggesting this solution.

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6: Re: I18N: Translating phrases rather than words (response to 1)
Posted by Vadim Makarov on 01/12/03 02:26 AM
So have you updated message keys? Should we wait or proceed with translation?

Can you give us an idea when the complete translation is due in order for the language to be included into OpenACS distro?

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7: Re: I18N: Translating phrases rather than words (response to 6)
Posted by Jarkko Laine on 01/12/03 09:41 PM
Vadim,

Please still wait a couple of days. We were just discussing this subject. Carl is demoing the system for some professors on Monday so the merging probably cannot happen then. I'm sure Peter will be back on this subject as soon as he gets the job done (if not sooner 😊 and this takes most probably place during the upcoming week.